The Awakening of Viennese Spring in the Eyes of YU Feng

The COVID-19 lockdown since mid-March has brought the artists in Vienna to a standstill. The galleries are closed. The exhibitions are cancelled. The get-together are postponed… While the existential question is being pushed more and more to the front desk, the artists rarely allow themselves to be let down by it. They are free in their own creative world. So is the Chinese painter Yu Feng who has spent the last 30 years in Vienna, considering this rich cultural capital as his true second home.

The lockdown brought him to the more serious pondering of the relationship between human beings and Mother Nature. During the past two months, he has painted numerous landscape pictures in the classic style of the Tang and Song Dynasties in ancient China. In those pictures, human beings are merely colorful dots within the marvelous, grandiose landscape of mountains and rivers. At the same time, he yearned for seeing again the natural scenery in great harmony in Vienna with the human life.

Early May, as the lockdown finally eased off, Yu Feng took a sketch book with his brush and ink, rode his bicycle to Schweizer Garten, Stadtpark, Schottentor and Türkenschanzpark, just to name a few, and began to draw those exuberant trees just woken up from the cruel wintertime.

Maybe one can immediately recognize which one is from which corner, of which park…